Cardiff PATT Rolling Grant

This grant will fund the travel of Cardiff members of staff to telescopes. It is an ongoing rolling grant, which we have held for a number of years. We here request renewal of this grant at level funding of £25k per annum of travel, plus associated overheads and FEC. In the past 2-year grant period an anomaly has arisen, and our spending on this grant has been significantly reduced. This is because the main UK facility which we use in our research is the JCMT, and in particular SCUBA and SCUBA2. During this reporting period SCUBA had already been retired from service due to final technical failure, the JCMT was shut for 6 months to prepare for the arrival of SCUBA2, and the delivery of SCUBA2 was delayed until 2008. This has meant that between April 2006 and the present time, none of our observers have visited the JCMT, which is normally our principal observing facility. In addition the Arecibo telescope was closed for 6 months for repainting the dish. We are leading the AGES long-term proposal on Arecibo. Hence Arecibo is one of the main non-UK observing facilities that we use. This has reduced our number of visits to this telescope also. However, in the forthcoming 2-year period we anticipate a return to our normal level of activity and telescope travel. JCMT is back on-line, and we will start observing there again. In fact, this has already begun, as one of our staff members has an observing run scheduled in January 2008 (PATT number M/07B/U01). SCUBA2 is due for delivery in early 2008, so all of the JCMT legacy surveys will begin. We are leading a number of legacy surveys on JCMT, and so will be heavily involved in observing there in the next 2 years. In addition, the Arecibo upgrade has been completed, so our observing there is also beginning again. We will therefore once more be heavily involved in the observing of the AGES survey. All of the other telescopes on which we observe will also continue to be used regularly. Therefore, we request a continuation of this grant at level funding of £25k per annum, plus associated overheads and FEC for staff. We have asked for 5% of the time of the PI and each of the co-Is. This is to cover the investigators' own time spent travelling to and from telescopes, as well as the observing time itself, plus the time spent supervising pdra's who are going observing. We are basing this estimate on 1 trip per semester for each investigator or their post-docs. We also request 10% of administration assistant Nicola Hunt for time spent on the grant booking flights and hotels for staff members and administering travel claims for the grant. In our report on activity in the previous 2-year period of the grant from April 2006 to March 2008 (see attached spreadsheet) we have had to estimate activity for the final 6 months of the programme. There are 3 observing runs which we know about, which have already been awarded time, one to Parkes, one to JCMT and one to Arecibo. There are also a number of other observing runs for semester 08A which have been submitted by members of staff. We have chosen a sample of 2 of these (one to JCMT and one to WHT) to include on the end of the spreadsheet, based on our typical success rates for telescope time. Here again we have estimated costs.